Victoria pianist Shoko Inoue will perform a solo concert at All Saints by-the-Sea on Friday, Jan. 31, with three very different styles of music from composers Gabriel Fauré, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Franz Liszt.
Fauré was a French composer who lived from 1845 to 1924. Inoue will perform three barcarolles by Fauré, all in the key of A minor.
“A barcarolle is a traditional folk song sung by Venetian gondoliers,” she explains in program notes. “Fauré expresses this gently rocking poetry without words with a profound and subtle sonority that will draw us into the innermost scenery of our heart’s waves.”
She observes that while Mozart flourished almost 250 years ago, “his love of life, humour, drama, celebration of unity and genuine fascination for the living music are still so clearly apparent in his musical compositions.”
Inoue will perform one of his rarely played sonatas, KV 533, the Sonata in F major.
“The sounds of the world over two centuries ago somehow are very contemporary, warm, giddy at times, and shockingly inventive and adventurous; in certain passages he seems himself to be dazzled by the maze of wonder.”
In the B-minor Sonata, Liszt (1811 to 1886) explores the grand scale sonata, deeply inspired by Goethe’s Faust.
“This sonata will take both the player and the audience to places inside of us, conjuring, rushing and gusting, with thundering explosions, ghostly encounters, yearnings and melting in moments of eternal bliss and awe. And yet, Liszt holds a steady course from the beginning until the end of this 30 minutes of music, magically transporting us to something so fantastical, as if the whole piece was in the sound of one bell chime,” writes Inoue.
Tickets ($35, cash or card) are only available on the day of the concert at the door.
The concert starts at 6 p.m., with doors open at 5:30 p.m. with seating on a first come, first serve basis.
Part of Inoue’s website biography details how she was a prize winner of the Cleveland International Piano Competition, first-prize winner of the New York Chopin Competition and contemporary music prize recipient of the Frinna Awerbuch Piano Competition in New York, where she made her Carnegie Hall debut. Notable appearances have included the Shostakovich Festival directed by Valery Gargiev at St. Cecilia’s Hall in Rome, a solo piano concert presented by the Embassy of Japan at the National Art Gallery in Ottawa and many broadcasted concerts at the Glenn Gould studio in Toronto.
She holds an artist diploma and certification from the Cleveland Institute of Music, as well as a master’s degree in performance from the University of Montreal. She studied with Sergei Babayan, John Perry and Mark Durand.
For more about Inoue’s musical experiences, see shokoinoue.com.